“This is the first time where they’ve self-folded such a complicated robotic structure,” says Ronald Fearing, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California at Berkeley, who has been following the MIT and Harvard researchers’ work. “Because they build it with the electronics on first, you can now choose which folds occur when. If you don’t have the electronics, then you’re limited to patterns where you heat up the whole thing and everything folds at once. So being able to do the timed sequence is a nice capability.”
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